Twitch Presents New Shoutout Feature

A new shoutout function from Twitch is currently operational on the platform. It enables streamers and a restricted group of users to “share the love” and call attention to famous users in chat, encouraging others to subscribe to their channel.

Over the past few years, Twitch has pushed additional interactive features on the site in an effort to improve the streaming and chatting experience. The Amazon-owned website unveiled a new feature on September 27 called shoutouts, drawing inspiration once more from well-liked third-party tools and bots on the platform. Before this, shoutouts were a well-liked community tool that let viewers and streamers promote each other’s Twitch channels via chat. The /shoutout command now incorporates it into the website. 

It will ask other chatters to follow the shouted-out account when entered in conjunction with another username. It can be found at the top of chat in a drop-down box among polls, predictions, and hype trains. Users will also receive a notification in their activity stream if they receive a shoutout. To prevent average users from misusing the shoutout tool in chat, it is only accessible to streamers and their moderators.

The Twitch community has embraced the functionality and appreciated how it is integrated into the service itself with better interactivity than the prior bot widgets.

Additionally, Twitch confirmed that the previously mentioned raiding features, designed to stop harassment and hate crimes, would go live on September 27. Streamers can now set restrictions on who can raid them by using filters for account age, raid size, and other factors. Together, the two new capabilities should provide streamers with more security when streaming live on the platform and more chances to meaningfully recognize friends and significant members of the community.